Customer Reviews

Crystal Reports 2008: The Complete Reference (Osborne Complete Reference Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The text is one of the first available for Crystal Reports 2008, and is a major revision of much of the same material which has been presented in previous editions (which covered earlier versions of Crystal Reports). As you would expect, it does a solid job of covering all the basics. It even goes into intermediate and some advanced details in a few sections.

If you are a beginner to Crystal Reports, then the book will be an extremely valuable reference to you. Even if you're an experienced Crystal Reports developer or you have used previous versions of Crystal Reports this book will get a lot of use. If you're familiar with the earlier renditions of this book (i.e., for Crystal Reports XI, etc.), then you will find this rendition similar, but greatly expanded and better organized. The book has been through several major revisions and this is clearly evident in the accessible, intelligible, and organized materials. Chapters that have been particularly strengthened from previous editions include charts and maps; a new chapter on integrating with Flash in compelling. Parameters and report export formats are covered in detail. Especially useful is the section on reporting from proprietary (e.g., non-SQL) data sources, including OLAP cubes and .NET integration. Finally, the concluding Formula Language Reference is encyclopedic and authoritative. At about 1,000 pages, the book is really heavy--but really useful, too.

One of the earlier reviews said this and other reference books were not good electronically. I just downloaded this copy a few hours ago on my PC, and within minutes I found what I was looking for. I think the electronic version is GREAT. I don't have to lug around a thick book and there are all kinds of links to move around quickly. I could see why it would be bad on the standard Kindle, but for larger screens such as the PC, it works just fine.

I purchased the paper and Kindle version of this book. The paper version is a terrific reference and 4 stars -- read other reviews, they pretty much summarize it well enough.

However, I would advise anyone NOT to buy the Kindle version. It is entirely impractical and useless in that format.

There is no good index with links to pages, and the table of contents is unwieldy as well. Even in the smallest font possible, the pages are difficult to use.

This isn't necessarily a shortcoming of this book alone -- I've made the mistake of purchasing several reference type books for my Kindle and all of them seem to fail in this delivery format -- but the sheer size of this book makes it ridiculously worse.

Spring the extra bucks for the real book. You will hate yourself for wasting your money on the Kindle version. And (no surprise) you cannot get a refund nor a credit towards the actual book from Amazon.

DON'T DO IT.

My team and I received this a month ago. It has become our primary source of information for Crystal Reports. In conjunction with two other books (Crystal Reports Encyclopedia Vol. 2 and Crystal Reports 9 on Oracle) we feel we have the resources to complete our project. This book lives up to its name in "Complete reference", with it we learned to use formulas to create very flexible reports. As in all projects the users always want the option to present the data in several ways, we have been able to produce these types of reports using one report and one set of data, but with different outputs. We feel this makes ongoing changes easier to handle with each report packaged alone. I strongly recommend this book and the other two as references for programmers new to Crystal Reports.

We recently upgraded to Crystal Reports 2008 and I needed a refresher course. Budgets are tight, so I wasn't able to take a class. I ordered this book to brush up my report writing skills and learn the new tricks of 2008. This guide is quite comprehinsive and well organized.

I've got this book and have been using it as a reference guide for work. I've re-entered the field of report writing using crystal reports and find this book to hold a lot of good information. I've searched a few times for things that are not covered in the book or don't appear to be in the right place and then figured out I was searching for things that are not part of crystal reports or using the incorrect terms when searching. All in all, I like the book.

The book covers a lot of what you need to know to start using Crystal Report 2008. The .NET explanation was pretty good.